


O is for O Club and Oval Office

by ivorygates



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Alphabet Soup Challenge, Canon Fixit, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-04
Updated: 2014-11-04
Packaged: 2018-02-24 03:56:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2567351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivorygates/pseuds/ivorygates
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>HAYES: (Smiles) General George Hammond. </p>
<p>HAMMOND: (Shakes his hand) Mr President. </p>
<p>HAYES: I think it was Lieutenant last time we spoke wasn't it? </p>
<p>HAMMOND: For both of us, that was a lot of hair ago sir.</p>
<p>(From "Lost City" S7e21) </p>
<p>Written for November 2014 Friendship Alphabet Soup.</p>
            </blockquote>





	O is for O Club and Oval Office

The first time they met was in Korea (PACAF, 4 AF, flying the F-100 out of Osan AFB, with the bright lights and big city of Seoul about an hour away). Both Air Force, both newly-commissioned First Lieutenants, but aside from that they had nothing in common: Lieutenant George S. Hammond was by the book, West Texas, bootstrap education and wings through OTS. Lieutenant Henry R. H. Hayes was old Boston, old money, Academy ring and daredevil attitude. George was saving his money to go home and put a ring on his girl's finger. Henry'd left a bride behind in Back Bay (as he said frequently), but it didn't seem to slow him down in his attentions to the opposite sex. The two of them knew each other the way pilots in the same fighter group will: bought each other drinks, played some pickup basketball, bitched about flight time and missions and mechanics. Henry was a card player, and George wasn't, so that was about it: Academy boys tended to flock together. Some were doing their five-year hitch and getting out, some talked about making General. George wasn't one of the "ring and the book" set, but he was planning on the long haul, even if everybody knew it was tough to stay in and move up in peacetime.

And there wasn't going to be another war. Was there? Even Korea was a UN force, with the USA tossing some rolling thunder in to sweeten the pot. Not the same as a war. (Some of the boys bitched about that, but George's daddy had been at Pearl. One of the lucky ones.)

The first time George got to see the real Henry Hayes was that November. George didn't hear about Dallas that day until he got to the mess: the news had broken around 0330 local, and Armed Forces Radio was still pretending it hadn't happened, but everybody knew. Flags were at half-mast, everybody was in shock. He still doesn't remember much about that day, other than his feelings of disbelief. The President of the United States had been murdered.

That night, Henry came banging on his door, out of uniform, bottle in hand. He was very drunk. It was hard to make out what he was saying, other than to blame all of Texas (and George by extension: well, George was _here_ ) for JFK's death. All George knew was that he'd better get Henry out of sight before the CO had to write him up.

He didn't get much sleep that night, but he did get to know Henry Hayes. The Hayeses and the Kennedys had known each other. Both Boston, both political families. Henry had been a guest at the Inauguration back in '61. Not that close, things being what they were, but both sons of ambitious fathers. That was the first time Henry told him he was going to be President some day: spoke of it as if it was established fact, as if the future was a thing set and solid and waiting for him on the flight line for him to show up. Said it wasn't right for a man to be killed for _being_ right. (And George knew that was true enough, but he also knew it happened more than sometimes.)

Henry slept on his floor that night, and in the morning George administered his patented hangover cure, and after that...they were friends. It was simple, back in those days.

The following year, peacetime was over. The new President took the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution between his teeth and started gearing up for (as it said) "the use of "conventional'' military force in Southeast Asia." That meant boots on the ground and planes in the air: the pilots of the Fourth swapped their F-100s for F-111s and called Takhli RTAFB home.

Vietnam was a different kind of war than the one their fathers had fought. Undeclared and uncertain, their allies weren't that much better than their enemies, and it was best not to think about their missions. The "Fourth But First" flew air cover for bombers, the bombers were bombing villages full of civilians, and if you got shot down, well...you tended to disappear. Nobody was going to come for you, and the VC weren't interested in following the Geneva Convention.

Of course, Henry's daddy pulled strings to get him transferred Stateside. And of course, Henry was as stubborn as a Missouri mule: he fought it as long as he could, but that was only about three months. He promised he'd write. George never found out whether that was true: the week after Henry left, he was shot down over North Vietnam.

He spent that Christmas in a cage in the middle of a village with a name he doesn't know to this day. Just like he doesn't know the how and why of his escape. He'd managed to keep his boot knife (even after he lost his boots), but he couldn't use it while the guards were there. (Bamboo cage in what passed for the village square, and the fact he didn't die of exposure was a testament to West Texas hardiness; the rain was the only thing that kept him from fatal dehydration.) He prayed to God for deliverance (by a month in, he wasn't any too picky as to what and how that deliverance might consist of), and one day, for no reason he could see, everyone in the village took off and left him behind. It took him almost a day to saw the cage open, and a week to walk back to where he ran into friendly forces (more surprised to see him than he was to see them; _the letter_ had already gone to his folks). He spent a month in a military hospital in Japan, then took his leave, went home, and married Tess. (Henry sent a wedding gift. Lord alone knew how he found out about the wedding.)

By 1967 George was Stateside once and for all. (Vietnam would run on almost ten more years, but he was just as glad to be out of it, all things considered.) The baby was a year old, and they were expecting another in a few months. He was looking to make Captain soon, and the extra money would be welcome. (It was another two years and a bit before he made it.) His new post was Cheyenne Mountain Air Base. It shared space with NORAD and the Cheyenne Mountain Complex: he wasn't all that happy about bringing up a family in a First Strike Zone, but as Tess pointed out, just about anywhere they were likely to be living would be just as perilous if the nuclear birds took wing. (Tess was always a woman of great sense.)

Henry continued to send Christmas cards (always, and Tess sent cards right back), as well as random postcards from wherever he was. Japan. Germany. Once from Italy. In '68 (with a fine lack, as Tess said, of the sense God gave a goose), he sent the Hammonds an invitation to his separation party (it involved a full-dress formal ball). The event was in Boston, the Hammonds were in Colorado. George sent a card. Tess sent flowers. (Down the years she followed Henry's career more closely than George did, finding mentions in whatever their local paper was at the time and clipping them to tuck them beside his plate at breakfast.)

George's father had a heart attack in July of '69. George went home on emergency leave, and watched Mankind land on the Moon from a hospital room, holding his daddy's hand. The doctors wouldn't say yes and they wouldn't say no about Daddy's chances, but they were all agreed on the fact that Thomas J. Hammond needed to rein in and take it easy from here on in. And George knew how likely that was, so when he got back home, he put in for a transfer to somewhere closer to the family. (Tess missed Texas, and so did he.)

But before that transfer went through he got himself caught up in one hell of a crazy thing. The first he knew of any of it was when he was sent to pack up some items for shipment. Tech Sergeant Baconne, who was guarding them until he got there (for reasons known only to Command), knew more than that (the NCOs always had the best gossip); he said the stuff belonged to a bunch of Russkie spies they'd nabbed up at NORAD the day before. Major Thornbird was shipping them to Kirtland AFB, and their gear with them. (The damndest stuff you ever saw. Didn't really look Russian to George.) Orders were orders, so he did what he was told. He was just as glad it was a one-man job when he discovered the fact that one of the spies had been carrying a note _with his name on it, written in his own handwriting_.

He packed up the rest, pocketed the note, and made sure he was assigned to the prisoner transport.

It was neither the first or last time he'd lie to his commanding officer, and there was nothing anybody could teach a West Texas boy about shaving the truth. (The strangers'd said he'd make General someday. It was nice to think about. He didn't really believe it until he met Jake and Liz Carter and their kids, though.)

After that his transfer came through, and they were posted to Dyess AFB, just outside of Abilene. It wasn't as close to Odessa as a man might like, but it was closer than Colorado Springs, and that year George made Captain and was fast-tracked for Major. He was glad to be there for Mama when the second stroke and the third one came and they had to put Thomas Hammond into the ground. Mama sold up their bit of land and came to live with him and Tess and the kids. (That was the year Henry became the junior senator for Massachusetts.) Mama wouldn't leave Texas, though, so when George got orders for Vandenberg some while later, she moved in with his sister up to Dallas. (Little Tess and Peter were in school, by then, and growing like weeds.)

Time passed, and it was Colonel Hammond now, and he'd long since (mostly) forgotten about an unlikely group of Russian spies with the gift of prophecy. Peter grew up, followed in his father's footsteps (Air Force Academy for Peter, and George was proud to see it), married a wonderful girl, fathered two beautiful daughters, and died too damned soon (in the service of his country, an honorable death, but still). It was hard at the time, but George found it in himself to be grateful that his Tess didn't live to see her boy dead: she'd died the year before Peter did. Cancer. (Henry's wife sent white roses and a personal note of condolence.)

Made General (wishing Tess was here to see it), and even got himself a second star. Washington, now, Pentagon duty, a world away from the hardscrabble ranch he'd been born and raised on. (He'd watched Jake's girl grow up, and wondered, and wished sometimes he'd asked Tess what it all meant, but a promise was a promise, so he never had.) Command was a heavy yoke, and he knew the decisions he made would affect the lives and fortunes of hundreds, even thousands, of good men and women. But Daddy'd been a jackleg preacher, and George knew his Good Book: "For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required." It was a good life when the blessings and the burdens balanced out.

And then it was '96, and thirty-some years in service was enough for any man. His garden beckoned, and maybe a bit of fishing. Higher offered him an easy transitional assignment to run out his time, babysitting a mothballed black budget project located in Colorado Springs. It was a gracious and generous featherbed—Josephine lived there— (Peter had been stationed at Peterson) and George looked forward to the prospect of spending more time with his grandkids.

It was funny-peculiar to be back in his old stomping grounds.

About a year later, it got a lot more peculiar and a lot less funny. And he stopped thinking about retirement. There wasn't time for much but to do the impossible six days a week and pray on the seventh day they could keep on doing it. The oddest moment out of all of it, he thought privately, was writing a note to himself that would be delivered in 1969, and thinking he was writing it because he'd received it, and, well, he guessed he'd let Captain Carter worry about the fine points. In the process, he got to know POTUS better than he would ever have expected to (or wanted to, considering that the only time he spoke to the man was when Earth was—once again—on the brink of Armageddon). But they made it work, him and the men and women with whom he served. Heroes, every one of them.

Without Tess here, he'd lost track of Henry's doings (too much else to keep track of), but in '03 he couldn't have remained unaware if he'd tried: the Senator from Massachusetts declared his intention to seek the highest office in the land, just as he'd told young Lieutenant Hammond he would forty years before. (The papers were full of stories about "Camelot Reborn", and similar nonsense, well, George could recognize a good PR strategy when he saw it.) He would have been happy to cast his vote for Henry come the day, except for the fact that Henry's running mate was Senator Robert F. Kinsey. (A familiar face around George's command, and a bird of ill-omen.) Because of Kinsey, George was the first Hammond to vote Republican in over a hundred years, but the fact that the choice was between "bad" and "worse" didn't mean you didn't choose.

It didn't change the outcome. The Hayes/Kinsey ticket won. George sighed, and braced for trouble, but they had enough trouble right here that the matter entirely slipped his mind. Until the phone on his desk—the red one—rang toward the end of January.

George spent a good few seconds staring at it in bemusement. He called POTUS often enough, but he couldn't think of one time in the last seven years that POTUS had phoned him up out of the blue. Still, he couldn't just _stare_ at it. He picked up the receiver.

"General Hammond."

_"George!_ I can't believe you've been holding out on me all these years! I thought we were friends!"

Henry.

"I hope we are, Mr. President."

"I'm not sure I'm going to forgive you, George. So. When can I see it? I'm the President, you know. I get to go places and do things."

"Yes, Mr. President," he said. "I'll arrange for a tour." Despite himself, George Hammond chuckled. "After all, what are friends for?"

###

**Author's Note:**

> Because TPTB can't be bothered to do their research, they have Hayes taking office in 2004. While Hayes would have been _elected_ in 2004, his inauguration would have been in January 2005. This throws all of S7 out of whack, since it's Hayes who forms Homeworld Security after Anubis's attack on Earth, meaning he has to be in office in January of 2004, which he can't be. Also: since Henry Hayes is clearly meant to be a President in the JFK/Jed Bartlett mold, he has to be a Democrat. Kinsey is, just as clearly, a Republican born and bred, but as Hayes' running mate, he has to be a member of the same party. Regarding both these matters, and many more, I am just going to stick my fingers in my ears and HUM. I suggest you do the same.


End file.
